There are two fundamental active components to a lesson that make it a lesson, and not a bunch of people together in a room for an hour: NEEDS and DECISIONS. If something is going wrong wrong, that means either ... a) you have misunderstood the needs of the individuals that comprise the room, or b) you have ignored, lost, given away or misused your decision-making power. Learners communicate need and the teacher makes decisions accordingly. This is obvious? Right, so that means, don’t do this…. "Alright kids, today, we need to cover talking about the future, so I am going to give you time to talk about the future with anybody you want to for 5 minutes." Two mistakes … a) The teacher has chosen an arbitrary and vague area of concern (probably determined by a syllabus or a textbook). Nothing of the learner’s needs are involved here at all, unless by chance. b) The teacher has made one decision — not do take any responsibility for the next 5 minutes. Anybody that has had at least 20 minutes of experience teaching kids (but also if you work with adults, and take the work seriously) knows that the activity described above doesn't work. Still, I see experienced teachers run activities like this all the time. The rationale is very simple: it LOOKS "student centered." Students-centeredness doesn’t happen simply by letting go of the steering wheel. To be ANYTHING-centered, there needs to be a center. There needs to be a decision-making locus. That is YOU. Yes … yes … yes … okay … you want also ultimately to empower your students to make decisions and take initiative, but there is one person whose job it is to make — WHO IS GETTING PAID to make, WHOM PARENTS ARE ENTRUSTING with making — decisions, and that is you. When things seem to be falling apart — and if you are doing your job right, pushing the envelope of what your kids can do and what challenges they can handle, they will — when your class begins to lose its direction, before playing a Mr. Bean video, before saying to the class, “eh … uh … okay discuss,” ask … a) Do I know the needs? What am I doing to determine the needs? b) What decisions have I made so far, am I making now, and do I need to make in order to connect this lesson with those needs?"